Did July 1 Quietly Make Your Labor Law Poster Out of Date?
Most 401(k) plan failures don't start in the retirement plan. They start in payroll.
A single deferral coded to the wrong bucket, a contribution that never made it out the door, a deposit that landed a few days late: on any given pay run, these look like minor housekeeping. But the moment they touch a qualified retirement plan, they stop being payroll hiccups and become compliance problems with the IRS and the Department of Labor (DOL) attached. The good news is that nearly all of them are preventable, and the ones that slip through are correctable if you catch them early.
Here's how these errors happen, what they expose you to, and how to keep them from reaching your plan in the first place.
What changed on July 1
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the July 1 increases reached more than 361,000 workers. The list includes:
Alaska, now $14.00 per hour
Oregon, now $15.55 statewide, $16.80 inside the Portland metro area, and $14.55 in nonurban counties
Washington, D.C., now $18.40
Chicago, now $17.05, and Cook County, now $15.40
Montgomery County, Maryland, now $18.00
Los Angeles ($18.42), Los Angeles County ($18.47), San Francisco ($19.61), plus eight other California cities including Berkeley, Pasadena, and Santa Monica
Even if your state held steady, a single employee working in one of these cities or counties can put you under that locality's posting rules.
What an outdated poster can cost
Federal posting penalties adjust for inflation almost every year, and the current amounts are not small:
Missing or outdated OSHA posting: up to $16,550
Employee Polygraph Protection Act posting: up to $26,262
EEOC "Know Your Rights" posting: up to $698
FMLA posting: up to $216
Combined, federal fines across the mandatory postings can exceed $43,700 per location, and state and local violations typically add their own fines on top.
Here is the part that catches employers off guard: agencies rarely go looking for poster violations. They find them while they are on site for something else, like an I-9 audit, an OSHA inspection, or an EEOC investigation. An outdated poster turns a routine visit into an extra citation.
Remote employees count too
If you have remote or hybrid staff, physical posters in an office they never visit do not cover you. The Department of Labor allows electronic posting in many cases, but only when employees can readily access it. If your workforce went hybrid and your compliance strategy did not, this is the moment to fix both.
The fix takes five minutes
You could track every federal, state, county, and city posting change yourself. Most of our clients would rather not, which is why Strongpay offers a Labor Law Poster service: when a mandatory posting changes anywhere you have employees, an updated poster ships to you automatically. No monitoring, no reprinting, no wondering whether July 1 applied to you.
Ask your Strongpay service rep about adding Labor Law Poster service, or contact us at payroll@strongpay.com.